Saul Williams's new album:

I've been an admirer of poet, musician and actor Saul Williams since I saw him in the movie Slam nearly ten years ago. So I was totally geeked when I got his newsletter telling me he's got a new album out, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! In this interview, Williams discussed the influences and purpose behind the project.

On the one hand I was inspired by Bowie and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, by title and by concept. I also believe that Electric Ladyland was a concept album too, and Niggy Tardust is musically far more related to Electric Ladyland meets Afrika Bambaataa than it is to Ziggy Stardust. Where as Starchild and George Clinton, there’s a huge connection to that because that’s what I was listening to while I was recording, was a lot of Funkadelic. I think that music is extremely important when you think of the role that James Brown, Bootsy Collins, and George Clinton have played in contemporary music, there’s nothing like that today. It's what transformed the bass and the sound of the bass into what it is now in contemporary music. There’s nothing in our generation that rivals that.

This is Williams's third album and, at producer Trent Reznor's encouragement and of his own accord. He's going Radiohead. In ordering, you can either pay $5 or nothing. Your choice.

As a loyal fan of both hip-hop culture and technological innovation, seeing the two coming together is like a chocolate and peanut butter injection. I'm giving the man 5$. And a ton of praise for running towards the future.

A Day for Humor:

Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and David Mamet were all born on this day. Wow (via The Writer's Almanac).

Thought of the Day: "Doom"

"People are surprised when they find out I'm not a doomsayer. I greet the day, I enjoy my family, and try not to be one of those shrieking bores you dread at dinner parties. I write about these subjects because I believe there is hope and capacity for change, not because there isn't"

--Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and an inspiration of mine. Seen last night at City Arts and Lectures)

Now it's come to this...

So it seems now women who work in technology/silicon valley/web 2.0 can now be rated by hotness and Digg-style voting.

I'm so proud to work in this industry that can pass good ole-fashion ogling off as innovative fun. And since the whole word is going micro these days, I propose next a digg-style rating site where you can submit your own body parts. Because man, I've got earlobes that could stop a clock.

UPDATE: There's a version where you rate guys also but, surprise, surprise, it's mostly wealth and much smaller than its female equivalent. (via BuzzFeed).

Sparkly:

If you love San Francisco as much as I or are even kinda curious, you must download any episode of Sparkletack, a narrative podcastical journey into the stories that make up San Francisco. I've already learned about Starr King (Abolitionist and the only person honored with burial within city limites), San Francisco baseball history and the origins of the verb "to shanghai", invented right here in our fair city.

I love to learn new stuff.

Produced and hosted by webdesigner Richard Miller, each episode is reseached up an down and runs 40 minutes to an hour. I listen in the car.

Miller claims each episode is between 20-40 hours of reading up, making the whole thing a complete labor of love. More than I could ever do.

Subscribe immediately. Do not let this man's work, or the lost sirens of our city go unheard (via Laughing Squid).

Absolute Beginners:

This recent interview with film director Julian Temple has me convinced I must see Absolute Beginners, a 1986-musical about youth culture in 1950s London. It's been compared to Streets of Fire in its size, nostalgia and lousy box office take.

Which means I should have rented it. Yesterday.

The Riot goes Quiet:

I just heard the Kevin Dubrow, lead singer of Quiet Riot died last week at ae 52. Cause of death has not yet been reported. I haven't thought about them in a minute but, man, could they work a glam rock cover like Cum On Feel the Noize (originally written by British band Slade). The entire Metal Health album, QR's debut, was a good part of my childhood.

Sad (via Ed Champion).

Blake's Birthday:

"To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour."

Happy birthday William Blake! (via The Writer's Almanac)

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Blood In, Blood Out:"

Blood In, Blood Out (1993): "It is rarely a good sign when the Wikipedia entry for a movie is more compelling than the movie itself."

Notes: A classic case of eyes bigger than stomach. An over-three hour biography of 3 friends from East Los Angeles in the 1970s and the prison gang warfare of the period, where apparently, racially identified squadrons of convicts waged bloody mayhem throughout California correctional facilities to gain control of the system's drug trade. Although BIBO claims the conflict is over (which I believe to a certain extent), the 2004 New Yorker profile of Aryan Brotherhood, tells me it has simply changed form. The FBI estimates that also Aryan Brotherhood makes up less than 1% of the prison population, it's responsible for 26% of the murders in prison.

I'm fascinated by the topic and didn't realize how emblematic the war was of the chaos of the era. American Me, a much better movie about the period, focuses on the Mexican Mafia and the historical links between the Zoot Suit Riots, the gang's formation and the identity of the East Los Angeles community. In the east, the early 1970s was the time of the Attica Prison Riots, one of the darkest incidents in American law enforcement.

I don't know the history well enough to say but I wonder if the modern prison reform movement came out of this messy time. It's got me thinking, which I suppose makes Blood In, Blood Out a useful if sloppy,  movie, a great topic handled with thumbs instead of care.

Working On: 11.26.2007

I'm going to try beginning each day blogging my goals and tasks for the day. Since the workday's almost over though, here's a quick list of my goals for the month.

• Finish book proposal. My agent's given my next book idea a greenlight so I gotta get the proposal done by Dec. 15th with the goal of sending it out early next year.

• Finalize BookTour.com partnerships for the year and set goals for 2008.

• Finish up remaining goals for 2007. I wrote them out on a legal pad last December and need to double check my progress. Think I'm on track for a very productive year.

• Write out 2008 goals. Worked for this year.

• Plot big fitness challenge for January. A 10K? A walk across San Francisco?

• Leave room for downtime. None of this is worth it without a sense of calm and serenity.

December in San Francisco...

I'm so happy to back home in San Francisco after a week away. had a wonderful time in New York and Florida but after the difficulties of last December, I promised myself to be home through 2008. Now that I'm hear, I can't wait.

I'll be plenty busy so no bons bons and spray on tans for the rest of 2007. But just being home brings my nerves into quiet harmonies with my surroundings. To be with my friends, my girlfriend, Faygo the cat and my home. It's like a perfect gulp of hot cider on a clattered cold morning.

NYC:

I'm in New York for the next couple of days, visiting friends and family, meeting with the agent person. I head to Florida for Thanksgiving Tuesday Night.

If I can blog, I will. If not, have a great holiday weekend everyone. More soon...

"Friday Night Lights": Just a Bit too Soon...

Ok so I spoke a bit too soon. According to this morning's New York Times, a show like "Friday Night Lights" which has original episodes in the can until January may have a chance to connect with viewers since its new episodes outdistance those from more popular serial shows that "do rerun well"

Well that's sort of a relief.

Look out for Ghostland Observatory:

I never make predictions as to whether a bad is going to be big, because, eh, I suck at it. But I think we've got a good horse here.

Ghostland Observatory, a duo from Austin, TX, whom i saw at the Treasure Island Music Festival is going to be huge. I can feel it in my twitching feet and beat infected butt.

Tell me if you can listening this without getting down with your bad self. C'mon, I dare you.

Dimming of 'Friday Night Lights'

On a completely selfish yet related note, it just hit me that a strike could spell the premature end of a television series with tenuous ratings like Friday Night Lights, my absolute favorite show on the dial. It's a fear confirmed by this week's episode of "The Business", in which the guests assert that the network in biggest trouble thanks to the strike is NBC, with limp ratings and a 4th place schedule. It's also FNL's home.

Well that's just cookie. Anyone had this happen before? What show?

"Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's Image":

In what looks like a shift of cultural influence from southern to northern California, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape has published an essay titled "Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's Image." Andreessen makes three large predictions.

First, ongoing alienation of a new generation of TV viewers.

Second, driving consumers even faster to the new range of activities they can engage in.

Third, and most significantly: catalyzing faster development of new business models for entertainment media.

The third point I find the most interesting. The author breaks it down as follows...

What would a new entertainment media company, producing original content, look like in the age of the Internet?

• Starting from the end of the process: you know distribution is now nearly free. Put it up on the Internet and let people stream or download it.

• Marketing is also free, due to virality. Let people email your content to their friends; let people embed your content in their blogs and on their social networking pages; let your content be searchable via Google; let your content be easily surfaced using social crawlers like Digg. All free.

• Production is very cheap. Handheld high-definition video cameras cost nearly nothing. You can do almost every aspect of production and post-production on any Mac. Hell, you can even score an entire movie for free -- there are hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet who would love to have their music embedded in a new entertainment property as promotion for the bands' concerts and merchandise.

• The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors -- they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company's success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.

• Financing is straightforward: venture capital, just like a high-tech startup. We live in a world in which financing a high-quality startup is simply not difficult -- not for a high-quality technology startup, and increasingly not for a high-quality media startup. Modern financiers love being co-owners of a new company with the talent that will make the company successful -- and that's how it will happen here.

I need to read a little closer but this is a take on recent events down south I hadn't heard yet.

Mini Milestone:

I just handed in the first draft of the proposal for my next book. Hooray! This is sixteen kinds of huge.

Thought of the Day: "Success"

"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." 

--Robert Louis Stevenson (via The Writer's Almanac)

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Dan in Real Life"

Dan in Real Life (2007): "Family is a shifting idea that nonetheless never leaves you"

Notes: I was all set to hate this as Steve Carell isn't one of my favorites. A good review on Ebert & Roeper and favorably short running time convinced me otherwise. Really a sweat little film about family and moving on. I liked it a lot.

Al Gore Goes VC:

This just in: Al Gore has become a partner in the silicon valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which funded Netscape and Google. Gore will head up their climate change solutions group--investing in green business and technology--and donate his salary to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Gore says he'll be spending 5-6 a month in San Francisco where he and his wife have an apartment in the SOMA district.

If I run into him, I'm buying him a New Orleans-Style Iced Coffee from Blue Bottle, the best in town. It'll be my way of saying welcome to town and thanks, because it's the least I could do.

Word of the Day: "Praxis"

Praxis (noun): Convention, practice, custom.

Heard: On an amazing interview with Junoz Diaz on KCRW's Bookworm.

A Day for Literary Heroes:

Happy Birthdays to Tracy Kidder, Wallace Shawn and Roland Barthes (via The Writer's Almanac).

Pac Man Meets Super Mario Brothers:

Word has it that this video was put together, all 691 frames of it, one frame at a time. That's like stringing beads blindfolded (via Coin-Op TV).

Gleanings: Mailer, Profiler, Girlier:

A reading queue dump...

• Norman Mailer is gone. The Elegant Variation has a nice set of appraisals.

• I'm dying to read this Malcolm Gladwell article on criminal profiling. If it were doused in peanut butter, it would have been delivered to be via heaven (via AL Daily).

• Speaking of the New Yorker, videos from the New Yorker Festival are now available as a podcast.

• The Carrie Bradshaw urban girl lifestyle has gone overseas. This article submits that this says a lot more about politics and economics than we think it does (via AL Daily).

• Business Pundit asks if constant connectivity is actually bad for your career.

• A blog on personal branding. Which sounds redundant, don't it?

Salt Lake City Tribune:

The Salt Lake City Tribune wrote up my speech at Pub West.

It's the best of times for readers whose access to books has never been easier. But with book sales looking flat for the foreseeable future, it may be the worst of times to be a publisher, said Internet entrepreneur and writer Kevin Smokler.

    "The contradiction seems to be it's the best time in history to be a book lover, but it's not the greatest time to be a person making books," Smokler said Friday.

    What is happening to books is the same thing happening to music, movies, television and newspapers. Digital technology is strengthening the hand of consumers at the expense of companies that provide culture, entertainment and information.

    "Those millions and millions of cultural consumers who are out there, they are in charge now. Not us, not the producers of what they consume," said Smokler, who spoke to the Publishers Association of the West, which is meeting at The Canyons Resort through today.

Side Note: The Trib mistakenly called Soft Skull Press an "online publisher." They publish regular ole' paper books. I brought them up as examples of innovators marketers in the publishing space.

In Park City via The Salt Lake City Airport:

I'm at the Salt Lake City Airport waiting for my flight home and felt like recapping the last 48 hours in park city. Which, correctly labeled by my new friends from Graphic Arts Center Publishing, felt like three weeks.

Recapping's probably too formal. Here's some stuff I learned out while I was out here.

• Park City's an old silver mining town turned ski and tourist destination in the late 1980s. Most of the remaining historic buildings downtown survived a devastating 1898 fire.

• Park City is only 30 miles outside of Salt Lake City, the state capital. The 2002 Olympics used Park City for a bunch of big hill-related events. Monuments to the athletes and games dot roadsides.

• Park City's really a sleepy town when it ain't ski season (which thanks to "bad science" is arriving later and later) or Sundance. Historic Main St. was practically deserted save a few other lost souls like me.

• The Village Candy Shoppe is charming as all get out. I walked in and heard a voice cry "Just a moment! I'm putting toffee on!" You just don't hear that anymore.

• I'd never been to a "swiss continental" restaurant before until the good people of Pub West took me to Adolph's on Saturday night. The name creeped me out (I'm Jewish. It might as well have been Geobels's World of Weiners) but both the food and company was delicious.

• Although my speech went fine, I don't think I have to give the "Wake up and pay attention to technology" speech anymore to book publishers. I think they get it.

• PubWest is filled with mighty nice people I look forward to keeping in touch with in the future. Next year the conference is in Portland. Hmmm. I might have to present a seminar at Ground Kontrol.

In Park City...

Just finished my big ole' talk in Park City. The living is easy for the rest of the weekend here.

Nice people in PubWest. I may have made some new friends.

Joseph Epstein:

Great interview with Joseph Epstein has me thinking some about the term "Public Intellectual." More on that later.

Thought of the Day: "Sainthood"

"All saints are guilty until proven innocent"

--George Orwell (via KQED's Forum)

Park City Bound:

I'm headed to Park City, Utah this weekend to give a keynote address (!) at the Publisher's Group of the West's Annual Conference. Having never been to Park City before and not being able to ski, I'm wondering what I should do in my down hours.

So who knows a thing about Park City that doesn't involve Sundance or hitting the slopes? If the answer is "nothing", I'm bringing a lot of books.

On that, I'm prepping like mad this week and probably wont be blogging much.

See you Monday.

Art Deco Ardour:

The Eastern Columbia Building in Los Angeles figures prominently into the pilot episode of Moonlighting, which I was watching this evening with my friend Amy. We were both enamored with it's gorgeous facade so I set about looking it up and stumbled upon the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles which doesn't seem to give tours even though I might insist. The San Francisco Art Deco Society has regular tours as does Chicago.

How about your town?

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Prom Night in Kansas City"

Prom Night in Kansas City (2002): "Proms are the first institutionalized attempts we get in live to mythologize ourselves."

Notes: Documentary about a Kansas City filmmaker who returns to her hometown and follow a roup of high school students as they prepare for their proms. Short but well executed and exquisitely researched (who knew the prom was created as a Debutante Ball for the common folk?). Accomplishes a lot in 60 minutes.

Thought of the Day: "Lost"

"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."

--Daniel Boone (via The Writer's Almanac)

Nobel 2.0:

KQED Perspectives

Movies this winter...

The New York Times's Holiday Movie guide got me thinking:

I haven't seen nearly enough movies in the theater, nearly often enough.

So I've got half a mind to see a movie every day in the month of December. Crazy, perhaps, but I just might.

Put to Death the "Death of" Article:

One of the most brilliant articles I've read on our reading future in quite a long time.

The technology boosters think of themselves as saviors of a hopelessly backward humanity, while grim-jawed Luddites are bracing themselves for an apocalyptic cultural collapse involving “the death of literature” rather than simply the death of print’s dominance. Both camps in the Print Wars rely on a similar and false sense of crisis. Human beings crave and adore absorption in narrative. The delivery mechanism for thinking entertainment can be pressed into clay, carved in stone, repeated from memory around a fire, incised on scrolls, illuminated, printed, typed, Xeroxed, acted out, filmed, animated, YouTubed, Second Lived, IMed, blogged, or beamed from Earth to Mars and back again on handheld screens. The problem for short fiction is that novels grab what’s left over after the movies, cable, and online media.

Yes, yes and more yes. Much to think about as I prepare for an upcoming presentation. Also, who is J.M. Tyree and can I be his new best friend?

Anne Coulter, My New BFF:

Political humor, my main man Baratunde notwithstanding, ain't really my thing. But I think this has a certain kind of lite genius to it.

And because I'm not very smart, I thought the singer was Jill Sobule (via Buzz, Balls and Hype).